We started our trip in Dublin, where we stayed at the Abraham House hostel, which is run by a man named Seamus, who delights in making fun of everyone. It was a great place to stay, being right near O'Connell Street, and not too far from everything on the other side of the Liffey. It's one house in a Georgian rowhouse, and it must have been nice when it was first built. The windows were huge and beautiful.

We had planned to stay for three days, when we did all of the normal sightseeing. We did the hop on and off bus tour, where you can see that the Guiness Brewery apparently takes up most of the land in the city. My one good Dublin picture was taken from my seat on the top of the bus.

Naturally, we went to Trinity College, where we saw the Book of Kells. Seeing the book is a little difficult, as they have it in a display case, and everyone insists on leaning over it so that no one else can see. I was much more impressed with the library, which was enormous, and had tons of old and very interesting looking books. My picture of the Long Room is from a post card as no photography is allowed inside.

The National Gallery had a really great collection, though we only managed to see the medieval and renaissance rooms. The National Museum is housed in the most gaudy, Victorian building. They were doing work on the facade while we were there, but inside was fine. The collection is really diverse, with Egyptian mummies mixed in with all the Irish artifacts.

Dublin is an interesting city. Boston is my usual large city of choice, and I must say Dublin was much cleaner, and there were many more people out walking around, though I'm sure Boston is bigger.

We had a bit of a car snafu, and ended up staying an extra day in Dublin. On the bright side, we got a more expensive private room in our hostel at the car company's expense. However, we had to cut Newgrange off our schedule, and we went to Glendalough from Dublin.